Kara Swisher’s festival of tech announcements, otherwise known as D Conference, continues apace with the revelation Amazon is soldiering on bravely with the Unbox in the mistaken belief people will pay for streamed video. I am glad that the Wikipedia picture captures Bezos in a suitably evangelical pose. Maybe he can manage it, having previously foist the Kindle upon the world.
Schonfeld rightly castigates him for not implementing free streaming with ads. For my money there are two successful models for online video. One is streaming with contextualised ads. This would require some kind of linkup with social networks which hold all the necessary data to do the contextualisation properly and I presume someone, somewhere is working on this.
The other option is paid for, downloadable video without DRM so content can be easily switched between devices. The current stumbling block in this is, I imagine, the content owners who are demanding DRM on video. It has taken the music industry a while to realise that technology companies were selling them a dud with DRM. The basic problem is that no matter how long you spend developing it as soon as it is released some Norwegian hacker cracks it in about thirty seconds then puts a DRM free version of whatever you are trying to peddle on Pirate Bay (or wherever) for nothing.
Now we have an answer to this but there is no point us even trying to speak to video content owners at this stage as they are not yet ready to abandon DRM. The day will come but it will take another couple of years. Fortunately I think it will take a similar amount of time for the technology to get there so in the meantime we are concentrating on our other projects.
